Social Media

Slacker Radio Integrates ABC News Content into Its Music Service

Good news for Slacker Radio fans — the web/mobile music application integrated ABC News into its stable of content today, allowing users to customize their news consumption as well as incorporate it into their Slacker stations.

Slacker Radio has gained its share of popularity among music fans for offering a nifty cache feature that other mobile music apps lack; after creating a station, you can save it for offline use (perfect for underground subway rides or long plane trips). Now it's distinguishing itself from other services even more by incorporating still more diverse content.

Slacker isn't the first service of its kind to incorporate news content — Sirius | XM does something similar — but this move does serve to give Slacker what could be seen as an edge over Pandora, which only serves up music and doesn't allow caching.

For 14 days, basic Slacker users will be able to access ABC News content; Slacker Plus users can keep on tuning in after the two-week period ends (the Plus subscription is $3.99 per month). The content — which includes segments from Good Morning America, anchored by Robin Roberts, George Stephanopoulos, Juju Chang and Sam Champion; and Nightline anchored by Terry Moran, Cynthia McFadden and Martin Bashir — is located within the mobile app in a folder marked "News," and works in much the same way music stations do (i.e. you can skip stories).

You can also choose to add hourly news updates to any of your stations, but the process to do so is laborious, to say the least. First, you have to futz around on the website, create a station, go to the "Fine Tune" tab to select that option, save the station, make it a "Favorite," and, if you're already logged into Slacker on your mobile device, sign in and out to make the Favorited station appear. Sure, you can choose to "Fine Tune" any pre-existing station — which is easier than creating your own playlist — or choose to have ABC News turned on for all your stations by surfing over to "Account Settings," but all this still requires signing online. We wish it were possible to do all that within the app, as going through all that song-and-dance degrades the whole easy and accessible aspect of it.

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